{"id":13482,"date":"2023-09-13T00:50:53","date_gmt":"2023-09-13T00:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/startups\/these-prisoners-are-training-ai\/"},"modified":"2023-09-13T00:50:55","modified_gmt":"2023-09-13T00:50:55","slug":"these-prisoners-are-training-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/?p=13482","title":{"rendered":"These Prisoners Are Training AI"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Across a sterile<\/span> white table in a windowless room, I\u2019m introduced to a woman in her forties. She has a square jaw and blonde hair that has been pulled back from her face with a baby-blue scrunchie. \u201cThe girls call me Marmalade,\u201d she says, inviting me to use her prison nickname. Early on a Wednesday morning, Marmalade is here, in a Finnish prison, to demonstrate a new type of prison labor.<\/p>\n

The table is bare except for a small plastic bottle of water and an HP laptop. During three-hour shifts, for which she\u2019s paid \u20ac1.54 ($1.67) an hour, the laptop is programmed to show Marmalade short chunks of text about real estate and then ask her yes or no questions about what she\u2019s just read. One question asks: \u201cis the previous paragraph referring to a real estate decision, rather than an application?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a little boring,\u201d Marmalade shrugs. She\u2019s also not entirely sure of the purpose of this exercise. Maybe she is helping to create a customer service chatbot, she muses.<\/p>\n

In fact, she is training a large language model owned by Metroc, a Finnish startup that has created a search engine designed to help construction companies find newly approved building projects. To do that, Metroc needs data labelers to help its models understand clues from news articles and municipality documents about upcoming building projects. The AI has to be able to tell the difference between a hospital project that has already commissioned an architect or a window fitter, for example, and projects that might still be hiring.<\/p>\n

Around the world, millions of so-called \u201cclickworkers\u201d train artificial intelligence models, teaching machines the difference between pedestrians and palm trees, or what combination of words describe violence or sexual abuse. Usually these workers are stationed in the global south, where wages are cheap. OpenAI, for example, uses an outsourcing firm that employs clickworkers in Kenya, Uganda, and India. That arrangement works for American companies, operating in the world\u2019s most widely spoken language, English. But there are not a lot of people in the global south who speak Finnish.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Metroc turned to prison labor. The company gets cheap, Finnish-speaking workers, while the prison system can offer inmates employment that, it says, prepares them for the digital world of work after their release. Using prisoners to train AI creates uneasy parallels with the kind of low-paid and sometimes exploitive labor that has often existed downstream in technology. But in Finland, the project has received widespread support.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s this global idea of what data labor is. And then there’s what happens in Finland, which is very different if you look at it closely,\u201d says Tuukka Lehtiniemi, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, who has been studying data labor in Finnish prisons.<\/p>\n

For four months, Marmalade has lived here, in H\u00e4meenlinna prison. The building is modern, with big windows. Colorful artwork tries to enforce a sense of cheeriness on otherwise empty corridors. If it wasn\u2019t for the heavy gray security doors blocking every entry and exit, these rooms could easily belong to a particularly soulless school or university complex.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Across a sterile white table in a windowless room, I\u2019m introduced to a woman in her forties. She has a square jaw and blonde hair that has been pulled back from her face with a baby-blue scrunchie. \u201cThe girls call me Marmalade,\u201d she says, inviting me to use her prison nickname. Early on a Wednesday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13482","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-startups"},"yoast_head":"\nThese Prisoners Are Training AI | Brandiary<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Across a sterile white table in a windowless room, I\u2019m introduced to a woman in her forties. 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